I got family up on Fort Pierce Beach/North Hutchinson Island and I will be heading up there end of month for Thanksgiving weekend. A daily routine is to walk a mile and half to the Ft.P fishing getty at the inlet. Next time I do that I will thinking of your story as I look out at the Atlantic.Dead nuts on! My max length of permitted stay in Bermuda was expiring, so I had to leave - and it was late November. I had been thinking about the Azores and then Europe, but some personal factors hadn't worked out, so I needed to head back to the States (wish it hadn't turned out that way, dammit.)
Also, the guy I had sold my previous boat to in the USVIs wanted to do an open ocean passage with me - his big dream was to do a circumnavigation, and he was just rarin' to go. It was a bit of a challenge to get him to settle down - all ideals, zero experience - and I figured that seeing a bit of reality would season him a bit.
The first four days (out of St George's for Charleston SC) were just beautiful: sunny skies, force 3-4 on the beam or the quarter... the kid was just dancing on the foredeck and laughing at me "trying to spoil his dream" with all these cautions and warnings. Then came the Gulf Stream.Late November/early December, as I've mentioned. We were about 120 miles out, so the "hump" was still ahead of us - and a day earlier, Iron Mike (NMN) started calling for an NNE gale, 34-39kt with 12'-18' seas.
As I'd imagine you know, normally that's not a big deal to a sailor. Take a couple of reefs, sit back in the cockpit (my boat, a Dutch-built steel ketch, had quite a nice pilothouse), and keep making those miles, right? As long as the waves aren't breaking, it's all just good fun. But this was in the GS, flowing north at about 4kt in those parts, and after a day or so, the NNE pushing against it had stacked those waves up until they looked like apartment buildings - ones we were now bashing into. Or that fell over on us, regularly. Add in the classic black skies with clouds damn near on deck, and you've got - well, what you get off the US east coast in late fall/early winter.
The kid had completely lost his shit by then, and was screaming for me to call the Coast Guard and come rescue us. I couldn't have him on the wheel - told him to go down in the aft cabin and stay there, or I'd put him there - and stayed on watch myself.
The weather worsened a bit - up in the mid-40s, gusting over 50 - so I climbed out on deck, struck the reefed jib and main and raised the storm sails (the reefed mizzen was working fine), checked and re-secured everything that was tied down, and made my way back to the cockpit. As soon as I did, though, I heard something that sounded like a train bearing down on us - looking to windward, I saw what looked like the side of a mountain covered in foam rearing up over the boat. I tucked myself a bit deeper into the cockpit, spun the wheel to head her more into it, and held on for dear life.
I felt the boat lifted, as if it was a toy - but we didn't stall, and the rudder and the keel kept their grip as we came up that wave face. Up, up... and then we were over, and I was fighting the wheel to keep us tracking so we wouldn't get rolled in the trough. A part of it broke over us, covering the boat completely - so that for a few long seconds, I was standing waist-deep in green water 120 miles east of Cape Fear, with only my masts sticking out above the surface to keep me company. Then, my "Flight" stopped being a submarine, shook it off, and came up from under - and that monster rolled away from us. Aside from the propane tank on the foredeck breaking its lashings and banging about hanging on only by its hose (which I quickly secured), we had taken no damage.
The kid was, of course, completely incoherent by then - and I was exhausted after being on watch for 30-plus hours. So, I headed back west, off the hump, and everything calmed down quite quickly; a couple of watches later we were setting full sail for the Bahamas and had an easy passage down. The kid rocketed off the boat as soon as we tied up at the dock (last I heard, he was doing little local sails around St. Thomas), and I crossed to Ft. Pierce in a dead calm a week later. Only time I've seen the GS that flat and peaceful...
Good times, good memories.
New study reveals insights on oceanic rogue waves
- Thread starter Bugenhagen
- Start date
Got an uncle (deceased a couple years now) but who lived to 94 with of course a lifetime of stories, one of which he worked a year or so in Bermuda. Among his many talents was a very skilled welder uphill/downhill/heli-arc/etc. Plasma wasn't around yet when he was active.
He told me once that, from personal experience, the rain goes sideways in Bermuda when a hurricane comes through.
Beautiful islands, pretty lucky with hurricanes overall, when compared to the Caribbean or some American coast. Normally they unwind by the time they reach up there.
I think they had a big one one, Fabian, about 20yrs ago, that caused damage.
I sat out Hurricane Gert in Bermuda the same year that I made that GS crossing - not a particularly bad one, barely reached Cat 1. Heck, I didn't even bother securing my wind generator for it (saw it making 40+ amps at one point, though...)
Originally, I wasn't going to stop there at all - I was out of St. Thomas and bound for the Azores - but as I was making my northing before going over the top of the Azores High, I spoke a Brazilian ship around the Sargasso Sea that told me their company was telling them Gert was going to head that way. The NMN High Seas broadcast told me there was a 'cane out there, but the commercial guys had their own weather routing services - better quality info. Bermuda was still north and a bit west of me, and I'd normally have passed it by, but I'd spotted a microscopic crack starting in the lower forestay terminal during the deck check that morning and had been mentally "engineering" the process of replacing it at sea (never, ever go to sea without Sta-Locs for all your wire terminals...) That decided me - because at sea, just like with flying, multiple small problems add up to compromises, and compromises lead to errors of judgment. We eased the sheets just a bit and headed for St. George's.
That turned out great... made some wonderful friends, saved another sailboat from going on the rocks during a blow at night (and had a dinner held for me at the local yacht club because of it), hung out with the captain and crew of a Russian research ship (sister ship to the one in the "Titanic"), ended up building the first public Internet access point on the island at the sail loft there (and got all my sails re-stitched in exchange - I came up with that deal while wrangling over price with Steve, the guy who ran Ocean Sails and became a good friend later.) Everyone I met there were just good, kind, genuine people. Definitely a warm spot in my heart.
P.S. Steve's boat and shop took some damage during Fabian - I contacted them to make sure they were all right - but last I heard, he and Suzanne were still in business. Very much an old-style, "sailor's home away from home" shop - part of an ancient tradition. Not many of those left.
Last edited:
You should really write about your adventures at sea if you are not already doing it.
It's an exciting read, even for people like me who wouldn't have to courage to sail away like this.
I love the sea but I think I fear it more.
I find fascinating how sailors go across oceans, and then have some scary tales from so close to shore, like boats nearly hitting rocks or your previous weather adventure "just" 100miles off the coast, which is not a walk in the park, but it feels like it when compared to the middle of the ocean, like a trip to the Azores.
Eh, maybe one day - after I'm retired. But on the other hand, I can't imagine being retired.
That's one of the things I learned from my Caribbean cruise: I can only screw off, live a life of leisure, for a month or two max before I get itchy. After that, I have to work - do something that engages with and brings value to other people... otherwise, I'm not paying for my ride on this planet, and that's just not something I can do.As I said to a friend of mine back then, "other people go to church; I sail." I'm not at all religious, but... the ocean invokes awe, reverence, respect - even love and fear, the whole gamut - within me. I get an echo of that in the mountains, out in nature, but nothing speaks to me like that blue water. Very strange, for someone who was born in a city far inland... maybe some ancestor of mine lived that life and I'm a throwback.
And yeah: a good sailor on a good ship doesn't fear the open ocean - all the hard, sharp bits are around the edges.
Don't know if you are a fan of Electronic Music or similar as I am but:-Eh, maybe one day - after I'm retired. But on the other hand, I can't imagine being retired.
As I said to a friend of mine back then, "other people go to church; I sail." I'm not at all religious, but... the ocean invokes awe, reverence, respect - even love and fear, the whole gamut - within me. I get an echo of that in the mountains, out in nature, but nothing speaks to me like that blue water. Very strange, for someone who was born in a city far inland... maybe some ancestor of mine lived that life and I'm a throwback.
And yeah: a good sailor on a good ship doesn't fear the open ocean - all the hard, sharp bits are around the edges.
Nice! I've got it running as my background music at the moment. I'm more about this kind of thing, though:
Eh, maybe one day - after I'm retired. But on the other hand, I can't imagine being retired.
I enjoyed reading your posts, sea adventures resonate with me too.
I worked on a commercial fishing boat for a year. We got caught in a storm only once. From what I can remember it was 50mph (or knots?), about hundred miles off the coast. Anyway, captain of the boat was only mildly impressed, he told me he was once in a 120mph(?) storm when he was working on a large boat further north (~MA). I remember big square barrels filled with fish were flying all over the boat like toys, glad they didnt crash me. It was at night, when we were heading back to harbour.
Would love to hear more of your ocean stories man, respect!
Yeah, probably 50kt - at sea, you don't usually measure anything in mph, and the marine weather services don't report it that way. That's a reasonable fall/winter gale in the Northeast. Heck, most San Francisco Bay sailors wouldn't think of it as anything unusual - I once watched a couple of racing dinghies competing there while it was blowing that hard! Most east coast sailors would have a leemer if they ran into something like that, though.
But that brings up a point: I once sifted through my logs and totaled up how much time I'd spent in bad weather at sea, gale force or better. Well under 1% - and I've made some long passages, where you have to "take what comes". We sailors love to reminisce about that stuff, but it's not all that common.
Now that would be... unusual, to say the least. Even assuming it was in mph, that's well over 100kt - a major hurricane (cat 3.) If it was in knots, that's almost 140mph - a cat 4. A storm like that doesn't just appear out of nowhere - it has to build, for quite a long time, and off a large temperature gradient - so it's just not believable to me that, in this age of communications, anybody would be out in something like that. I'd maybe believe in some newbie sailor with no clue being lost in something like that - but commercial guys? They'd have spooled up their nets/lines and been gone long, long before. All their buddies would have yelled their heads off and chased them off the water early on.
It's worth noting that wind force increases at a square of wind speed - so... as a 6-plus footer with ~2' average cross-section facing into the wind, I'd have, oh, 300+ lbs pushing against me at 100mph, and over 600lbs at 140. You don't manage a boat in that; that's when you find out if your architect and builder both did a flawless job. Or you die.
(Incidentally, I'm fairly familiar with the whole "Perfect Storm" thing; the guy had his boat lengthened - stupidly, without consulting any decent marine architect - at the same yard in St. Augustine where I used to haul out. The guy who ran the yard, a sour, cynical old Greek, told him that he was an idiot to do it and that it would make the boat unstable; it did. The "100-foot wave"... sure, buddy. Only one of those ever reliably recorded in open ocean, but, ya know, cool story.)
Good stevedoring and marlinespike seamanship are unfortunately in short supply these days. Some countries make their professional mariners keep up, but... all the commercial guys I've known are drunk, stoned wild-asses: great to party with, or to have at your back in a bar fight, but not anyone you'd trust to secure a load - especially not if your life depended on it. Mostly, they rely on luck and getting by. That's why so many of them get hurt or killed on a regular basis... not that they give much of a shit.
Glad you managed to stay safe.